Read the book: «H. R. GIGER TAROT»

PREFACE
From “Baphomet” to the “H.R. Giger Tarot”

After completion of The Crowley Tarot (© 1995 by U. S. Games Systems, Inc., Stamford), I felt both relieved and frustrated. I was relieved at having finished such a voluminous and well-researched book. Yet, I was dissatisfied because the book could not delve deeply enough into the mechanisms of the emotional depths if it was to remain salable. It suddenly occurred to me that, instead of helping people understand themselves, the marketing of esoteric texts as guides to self-realization serves to create varying degrees of identification with commercial models of self-realization. The pattern is always the same: People are encouraged to suppress their own evil and project it on to others, to hide the shadow in themselves either by denying it completely or at least giving it another name. I thought it was strange that today’s seekers of the truth go to self-realization workshops where they are given crash courses in the same divine plan that they found completely ridiculous when these were taught to them in religion classes. On the other hand, it could hardly be in humanity’s collective interest for people to find answers to life’s ultimate questions and redeem their souls. Once they are redeemed, they would stop spending their money on “models of self-realization.” At the very least, this would jeopardize the entire financial basis of human development.

While working on The Crowley Tarot, it occurred to me that all this dependence on models (in this case, the model provided by the tarot) was essentially nothing more than a spiritual dream cinema. Consequently, we bore ourselves to the point of exhaustion by repeatedly viewing our own dreams. Because humans want to live lives based only on goodness, the striving for truth corresponds with the childlike desire to perceive our own wishes in everything we see – and this is not the truth but infantile wishful thinking. So I asked myself whether it was time to question my own belief systems. I felt that the way in which I had structured “nuggets of knowledge” reflected my attempts to get a grip on life, add my own version of it to the flood of published books, and earn money in the process. This approach was far removed from the desire to gain knowledge. An inner voice somehow told me that this was exactly how some authors make fools of themselves: They court the respect of readers in order to distance themselves from their own lack of understanding.

As a result, in 1991 I began thinking about a tarot that would penetrate the mechanisms of human expectations a little more deeply and hold up a mirror to our unconscious images and concepts. It became clear to me that the tarot is a map with symbols so that we can look at our deeper psychological landscapes from the outside. As long as we do not place ourselves at the mercy of these models by considering the map to be the truth, there can be no objection to this approach. However, if we treat this model as our perceived truth, we will be at the mercy of our expectations. If we see the world only as we experience it in our thoughts, the models we use will convince us of our expectations.

On the other hand, this mechanism forces authors of tarot books to live up to their readers’ expectations if the books are to be successful. Everything must be depicted from an esoteric perspective, which believes it can even see signs of “spirituality” in extreme negativity and views the world through rose-colored glasses. This approach may be effective, but I dislike the assumption of basically using a creative trick to ultimately cut us off from the darker aspect of our instinctive values, which are a part of the greater whole and of our development. Or, if forced to confront them, we are told that we should always view these aspects as a means to the higher goal of self-realization. We know that collective imbalance is a precondition for dynamic development. This development must remain in a fluctuating state of unrest so that it can constantly rebalance itself if any type of growth is to occur. Yet, we continuously defend ourselves against this “unredeemed” condition without realizing that this act of defense is actually the foundation and therefore our creative contribution to growth. Even if we must “suffer” as a result, this cannot be deemed negative. But as long as we don’t allow these insights to flow into the models that we use, they cannot be expected to reveal the truth. Instead, the result is the suppression of this truth. If our expectations include models that are unable to understand themselves, then these models will lead us away from the truth. In other words: Our models can only reflect our expectations – but the expectations are derived in turn from these models!

Inspired by these critical impulses, I began thinking of creating a tarot that would penetrate more deeply into the unconscious mechanisms of our behavior patterns. I thought that if a critical book could bring to light the shadows of our lives and souls, it might spark a similar inspiration in the readers so that they could recognize their own thought patterns and inner concepts. One fundamental question that arose was how this concept of a “shadow tarot” could be translated into visual terms. What artist would be willing and able to implement such a demanding project?

It was precisely at this time that I came across H.R. Giger’s great book of paintings, Necronomicon. The title picture showed a fascinating monster: Baphomet, the symbol of the connection between the rational and irrational world. As I looked through Giger’s other pictures, it struck me that they were hardly bathed in the glow of psychological illumination. Each picture encapsulated the interconnected nature of human suffering with an absolutely grotesque, tortured perfection. These eruptive, delicately drawn, and closely interlocked visions complemented and overlapped each another in a bizarre panorama of Eros and Thanatos, of dream and reality. But before rejecting Giger as a mere conjurer of demons, I tried to recognize myself in the mirror of his pictures and asked whether he had something important to convey with his art. Didn’t these monstrous, corroded, crippled, and mutilated figures conjure up fears that are very real in view of the everyday horrors? These are fears that we refuse to face, so they fail to fulfill their natural task of confronting us with the effects of our own actions. From this perspective, Giger appears to be anything but a cynic or nihilist with no feeling for the harmony, beauty, and perfection of creation. Instead, I saw him as a very modern educator who could put his finger on the wounds of our way of life. Even if he didn’t do this in the classical humanistic manner by using logic, critical reason, and rational arguments but in the form of irrational, mystic visions, this was because the threat to our world also has deeply irrational traits at its innermost core.

At that moment, it become clear to me that Giger, and nobody else, must be the creator of the “Shadow Tarot.” However, although Giger was quite familiar with the Crowley Tarot and had also drawn inspiration from it as a painter and graphic artist, he did not feel strong enough to create a completely new tarot deck. But we talked, and after some thought, decided to select twenty-two of his paintings and link them together in our minds to create “The Tarot of the Underworld.” There was certainly no shortage of choices when it came to devising a tarot cycle in which the artistic value matched the psychological value. Many of Giger’s paintings, with their archetypal and highly symbolic pictorial language, seemed almost predestined for this purpose. His version of Baphomet provided the focus of our inspiration, the sun around which the planets of the other cards revolved until they had all been given their fixed orbits within the iconographic cycle. In 1992, Urania published the 500-page book as part of a set, together with the cards and a poster, under the name Baphomet. Seven years later, the Taschen-Verlag publishing company approached us with the idea of producing a shorter paperback edition. The prospect of making the Giger cards available to a broader international public was very appealing, but we thought that the idea of shortening the original work was neither convincing nor particularly original. This approach would not only break up a self-contained work; it would also fail to meet the expectations of the market.

Since the Giger paintings are documents of their time in their own right, and an homage to the tarot as a source of the artist’s spiritual inspiration, the relationship between the cards and the philosophy was different than the usual one. The cards were not “explained” in the common sense of the word; rather, their meaning was crystallized in a kind of “modern talk” between the philosophical questioning of the collective content and the creative depiction of deep fears. The explanations were therefore “mythologized” into the selected pictures to enable an alchemical symbiosis between the two. For the reader of Baphomet, interpretation did not mean simply being given a menu of oracular pronouncements from which to choose as they drew the cards. Rather, it referred to lines of psychological development that are reflected in the mirror of the picture that they look at. If we had watered down this approach by complying with the suggestion that we abbreviate the work, without simultaneously expanding the interpretation component (which had been deliberately neglected in the original work), we would have lost the philosophical superstructure without compensating for this by providing a useful book of interpretations.

We therefore managed to persuade the publisher not simply to produce a shorter version of Baphomet, but to work on a whole new concept with us. We sacrificed the “Mephistophelean” stories, brain twisters and mental games that often tackled the duality of collective thinking. We either left these out completely or included abbreviated versions of them in the description of the cards. But to compensate for this, we expanded the interpretation section into the main focus of the work. Although we lost the Baphometic philosophical superstructure, this meant that we gained a compact book of tarot interpretations that was easier to understand. We have therefore called it simply, but appropriately, The H.R. Giger Tarot.

Lake Constance, Walpurgis 2000

Akron